Beethoven’s Deafness By Sharon Coleman

Gunilla G CC



Beethoven’s Deafness 

I write my poetry in silence, almost never reading it aloud to experience the sounds in my  mouth and ears. The sounds register in my head, their rhythms accompanied by the  rhythms of my fingers on the keyboard. The internal music of the words and phrases are  what I would say if I were speaking, and they echo in the synapses of my brain as I write.  

I’m not sure how to describe this.  

When I pause or start to revise, I shift in words from the thesaurus for their tactility and  sound and a twerk in meaning. The first time that words rise into the air waves via my  vocal cords is in a workshop, and then, if something needs smoothing out, I feel it more  than hear it.  

I don’t really hear the music fully until I read for an audience, and it's the music that  connects us intimately—that’s what I feel the most.  

I don’t sense the music fully unless I project the poem on the board for my poetry  students to point out the complexity of poetry’s music without end rhymes. In such moments, I surprise myself at the degree of interior music in a poem written in silence. I find much more in the poem than I intended. Not only does meaning exceed the writer’s  intentions, so does the words’ music.  
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More scientists seem interested in what caused Beethoven’s deafness than how he dealt with it—it’s the musicians who ponder the writing of extraordinary music that the  composer cannot physically hear.

It's said that Beethoven was able to compose music after he became completely deaf  because the sounds were already embedded in his internal hearing—where the brain turns  sound waves into what we hear—and because he deeply understood the language of music. His transition to this did not come so easily, and Beethoven pounded on piano  keys just to feel their vibrations.  
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I fell out of language when I was seventeen—dance had supplanted it in my life and in  my brain. The writing I had so enjoyed and never doubted became fragmented—my speech aphasic at times—language could not begin to carry the experience of “immanence,” a philosophic idea I later decided must be close to what I’d felt then.  

years later, in a college remedial English class, I re-entered language through its music, the rhythms and melodies that vibrate within the body and rise to the throat and tongue. I discovered the cadence of the sentence as analogous to a dance phrase. I realized how tactile and dynamic language could be, the mechanical pencil in my hand, the words on the page and from the mouth. 
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Sitting in a college classroom, I’d watch a professor slash chalk accents over words to explain rhythms of English poetry—the iambs, spondees, trochees—and all I could think was “So what?” The instructions were clear, but sterile, compartmentalized, unconnected. Only once in college, a specific alliteration of S’s was pointed out to be mimetic of a serpent in a French play. I wasn’t learning anything about the depths of poetry, the ideas, emotions, and half-knowledge that sounds can plunge us into, and I wondered why. So, I wrote from my own sense of musicality. 
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All languages have specific rhythms in which they are spoken, and global languages have a multitude of rhythms, many coming from the languages they supplanted or exist along with, usually in a colonial context. Speaking fluently means speaking in the rhythmic flow of a language. Usually focusing on meaning, we miss the song of language.  

Like a dancer to music, we can be a marionette to the currents of those rhythms and  words. Or we can let them flow through us and shift to different basslines or melodies as  intention and intuition takes us. Or we can begin in silence and let the rhythms come from the body or from language itself.  
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As skills that come intuitively for a teacher are often the hardest for them to teach, I’m at a loss in teaching rhythm and sound in any writing class. The technical explanations are not within my experience. Like Beethoven, I don’t want to reveal my “deafness” because  of my profession.  

Instead, I speak a lot about becoming more conscious of the innate rhythms in one’s way  of speaking and working with those, adding more intention and shifting it up to avoid a repetition of the habitual. I talk about developing a constant awareness of rhythms, like the iambic hoof-beats of Shakespeare’s world or the rhythms of various copy machines in ours. I speak about the iambics of the heartbeat, our primal rhythm—and I think of my  mother’s arrhythmia that would fluctuate her heartbeat so that the blood pressure gauge  couldn’t read its rate.
For a few moments, we sit in silence and listen to the sounds and  rhythms of the building. Afterwards, I put on an eclectic playlist, and we free write.  Writing to music—though it’s not everyone’s thing—returns to the pulse of words, to the rhythms in language. It can also take us out of the typical rhythms of our poetic voice and  pull us to try other rhythms. 
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Musicality is one aspect of voice that I feel is not considered deeply enough. Our writing has a veritable thumbprint of rhythms and sounds. Having choreographed a short dance to  a friend’s poem, I became intimately aware of its music, and I still find the same rhythms  throughout her other work. 
I speak to my students about the homogenization of voice that tends to happen in MFA  programs. I speak about exploring the music of their voice in ways meaningful to them. One woman, a flamenco dancer, writes from those rhythms that have flowed within her body for years. I speak about performing my poetry with live music and how it changed  my voice. I describe being very intimate with my voice in an isolation room in a  recording studio with the timbre of every sound magnified. 
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Voice is not something that we consciously construct—though we can modulate it  intentionally for rhetorical reasons. It’s about a rising to awareness of our rhythmic tendencies, habits—our rhythmic fingerprints. It’s about writing a lot and discovering  from what you’ve written. It’s about listening to your writing in silence and discovering  all the music that inhabits your words later.  

I sometimes wonder if it is this act of writing so musically in silence that our deep voice  comes into being.

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Sharon Coleman is a fifth generation Northern Californian with a penchant for languages and their entangled word roots. She curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival.  Her books include Paris Blinks, micro-fiction and Half Circle, poetry. Her CRN appears in The Ana. She received the Maverick Award from the ruth weiss Foundation. She teaches creative writing at Berkeley City College and composition at U.C. Berkeley www.sharoncolemanpoetry.com.